Another Lawsuit: Will Facebook’s Woes Ever End?

It’s been more than 10 days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal exploded, and Facebook is still stuck in its worst nightmare.

The latest blow: The Menlo Park-based social media giant is being sued by three users who downloaded the social media platform’s messaging app Messenger on their Android phones.

The three users — one of whom lives in California — filed their suit Tuesday at the Northern District of California in San Francisco, alleging Facebook improperly collected their phone call and text message logs via Messenger and monetized the data for advertising purposes.

The lawsuit comes on the heels of Facebook admitting on Monday that it collected phone call and text message history — but only at the permission of the user. Facebook said it never sold this data nor collected the content of text messages or calls.

“You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission,” said Facebook in a “Fact Check” blog post. “This is not the case.”

The users write in their complaint that Facebook exploited a vulnerability found in the Facebook Messenger and Facebook Lite apps for Android. The apps included permission to gain access to the phone owner’s contact list but they used it to collect logs of phone calls and text messages, according to the complaint.

Before the vulnerability was patched in October 2017, it was collecting phone call and text message metadata as early as 2012, when the Android “Jelly Bean” OS version was introduced, according to the technology news outlet Ars Technica.

The vulnerability went viral last week when a Twitter user, Dylan McKay, tweeted about his findings after downloading a data archive from Facebook. McKay said he found his entire call history with his partner’s mother in his Facebook data.